Within the field, many scenarios involve the storage of values to a storage device set comprising at least one storage device, such as a collection of hard disk drives or a Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks (RAID). When a storage device is first provided, or when capacity on a storage device is deallocated and then reallocated, the physical media of the storage device may be initialized; e.g., the locations of the storage device may be wiped to a default value. This initialization may enable a process that accesses a location of the storage device where a value not yet been written to receive a specific value rather than an arbitrary value, including the previously written value in a deallocated area.
The initialization of a storage device may also be significant in storage scenarios involving a location set of comprising at least two associated locations, where the values stored therein have a particular relationship. As a first example, in a mirroring resiliency plan, identical copies of a storage set may be stored at two or more locations (often on different storage devices), such that a value stored in one location is anticipated to match the value stored in one or more other locations involved in the mirroring relationship. As a second example, in a parity resiliency plan, when a set of data values is written to data locations of a location set, a parity of the written values may be calculated and stored in a parity location of the location set that is reserved for the parity value, which may enable error detection, error correction, and the reconstruction of the data values in the event of a failure of some of the storage devices storing the values of the location set. In these scenarios, a failure to initialize a location may impact the confidence in the validity of the associated data sets; e.g., if data is written to a first mirror location but a failure occurs before the same data can be written to the associated location, a mismatch may arise that erodes confidence in the value stored in the first mirror location, and possibly in the remainder of the storage device set.